Latest news with #JimmyDoyle
Irish Independent
11-08-2025
- Business
- Irish Independent
Mediahuis Ireland buys stake in Clubber
Clubber is best known for live-streaming club GAA games, offering a subscription service for fans and coaches. Mediahuis Ireland will acquire a minority stake in the business, understood to be around 25pc, in return for investment to support Clubber's plans for further expansion – not only in the GAA but across a broad range of Irish and international sports. As part of the tie-up, Mediahuis Ireland titles and their readers, including those of the Irish Independent and local news titles across the country, will have access to video content, including highlight reels. The chief operating officer of Mediahuis Ireland, Ian Keogh, will join the Clubber board as part of the agreement. Clubber was founded by Microsoft veteran Jimmy Doyle in 2020 and has quickly established itself as a streaming platform for live sports in Ireland, with a strong focus on GAA. It delivered 1,000 live and on-demand sports events in 2024. Its model includes agreeing multi-year streaming rights deals with GAA county boards for access to club matches, which traditionally have not been available for broadcast on any live service. Currently, games from 14 counties are being streamed. These include the Tipperary, Cork and Kilkenny hurling championships, the club football championships from Kerry, Kildare and Meath, plus the Camogie Club Championships. The model is built on combining scalable, tech-driven infrastructure with acquiring rights to a large volume of live sports in order to provide a comprehensive offering to fans of under-served competitions. The model is now being expanded into the UK, and into sports other than the GAA. David Courtney, Head of Sport at Mediahuis Ireland, said Clubber is transforming sports streaming. 'We are thrilled to partner with Clubber as it revolutionises the way Irish and international sport is streamed,' he said. 'This partnership underscores our commitment to supporting local sporting communities and providing unrivalled access to sporting stories that matter.'
Irish Daily Mirror
08-08-2025
- Business
- Irish Daily Mirror
Clubber GAA's a perfect mix of tech and David Clifford's GAA 'magic'
It's been some week for popular GAA streaming platform 'Clubber' and their CEO and founder, Jimmy Doyle. After five years of steady growth - or "blood sweat and tears" as Doyle terms it - they signed a high-profile sponsorship deal with insurance giant Aviva. And this weekend Clubber will show a record-breaking 81 live GAA club championship games from eight different counties. Doyle now has 14 County Boards on his books and he can't fully understand why more don't sign up. Viewership goes along expected lines with one massive outlier to it all. Clubber's highest viewership ever was for a Kerry Intermediate Championship Final two years ago. 'There's a valid reason,' says Doyle. 'You can probably guess why that was. You know who plays for Fossa?' Yes we do. 'It helps when David Clifford is on the pitch - he's good for numbers,' continues Doyle. 'He's great. In the semi-final of that competition they (Fossa) were down a point going into injury time and he scored a point for the ages on the sideline. It was just magic. 'He went on to have an unbelievable performance in that game to get his club into the final. I think they (Fossa) are still our top gun.' Surprisingly, just 10percent of Clubber's audience is outside Ireland. At €150 for an annual subscription, fans can literally view hundreds of games live or watch them back again. They're a slick operation now and a tight one, with 10 full time staff and a small but growing army of camera operators and commentators across the country, with most games a two person job. The Aviva sponsorship deal is another string to their bow. 'It's a really nice validation for us,' said Doyle - a hurling fanatic from Tipperary. 'It's a big brand in the industry. You put years into something and it's moments like this that show you're on the right track. 'It's a big moment for us. The team in the background makes it all possible — I probably just get in the way at this point. 'I'm still fairly active on it all - don't get me wrong. So I'm not able to let it go. I suppose it's more maybe I'm getting in their way now at this stage. "And they're like, 'Stop interfering and let us at it - we know what we're doing.'" Doyle has big plans to branch into ladies sport and other sports as subscriber numbers increase. Clubber is still a child, very much a covid baby. While the world stood still, Doyle saw an opportunity in the sudden shift towards live-streamed sporting events with costs a fraction of the satellite technology used for TV. The former Moyne-Templetuohy hurler, who spent over two decades at Microsoft - where he led engineering teams and worked across global markets - had found a way to combine his passion and his profession. 'The whole streaming space kicked off during Covid and became a necessity,' he explains. 'Everybody started to just figure it out and it really just started to come to me in terms of 'Wow, there's real potential here,' and I started going at it then. 'It's (GAA) a key part of your identity and then the marrying with tech. It became a really, really passionate project for me. It taught me the right and wrong ways to build software. Fossa's David and Paudie Clifford celebrate after their All-Ireland junior final win in 2023 (Image: ©INPHO/Bryan Keane) 'Clubber, for me, is a tech company. It's built from the ground up and that's really where my experience has lent itself so well to it.' It certainly wasn't all smooth sailing. Doyle still remembers the early days vividly - especially the turmoil around a McGrath Cup match in January 2021, with Kerry facing Limerick. "It's still fairly etched on my brain," he says. Clubber suddenly went from small club games to a big inter-county news story. 'Jack O'Connor was just back in with Kerry," says Doyle. "Kerry supporters just went crazy to watch it relative to what we would have seen before. 'And suddenly I'm like, 'Jesus Christ, there's just that much more people coming in here relative to what we were used to.' 'Suddenly the site does not behave too well and you're getting calls. I had the naivety of having my phone number up there at the point in time so my phone is hopping. It was a crazy day. 'That gave us a really harsh lesson. We've never forgotten that moment and we spent probably the next six months fine-tuning all the software and really protecting ourselves for such an eventuality. "Thankfully we've moved on since then. But the mistakes you make, the harsh lessons, they're the best lessons.' Clubber's audience skews towards young male fans, but Doyle says they're seeing significant engagement across the full range of demographics, including older people, females and families, all tuning in. 'We're seeing decent growth year on year on the subscriber base and that's the thing that we're trying to grow and that's the thing that I think will ultimately be the long-term value for people," he says. 'I'm sure you've seen our pricing versus even counties who are just doing their own games and they're really pushing to €200, €250 to just watch an individual county. 'Whereas we're €150 to watch 14 counties. We put up a 20percent promotion (discount) there for about two weeks and it definitely took off more than we were expecting. That was nice. 'We think we're really well priced. We've had strong growth year on year, and we're trying to keep delivering value — whether that's for a die-hard fan in their 70s or a young player watching their own highlights on socials.'
Telegraph
01-08-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Ex-Harvard professor says trans rights are ‘social contagion'
An ex-Harvard professor has called trans rights a 'social contagion'. Prof Jimmy Doyle, 61, resigned from his role as a philosophy professor at the Ivy League university before claiming he'd spent five years 'self-censoring' his gender-critical views. Taking to social media, Prof Doyle claimed he wasn't able to 'speak frankly with anyone for about five years', adding: 'And it'll be hard to forget the spectacle of this nation's intellectual elite enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society.' He also accused the trans movement of being a 'social contagion', saying: 'This is easily the most extraordinary outbreak of mass irrationality I have encountered in my life, & it has permanently & profoundly altered my conception of human beings. Among young people it has provoked the most obvious social contagion since the Children's Crusade.' The Children's Crusade was a failed popular crusade by European Christians during the summer of 1212 in which thousands of young people set out to reclaim Jerusalem from Muslim rule. None of the participants ever reached the Holy Land, but according to the Britannica encyclopedia, it was arguably the first European youth movement and its religious fervour helped to initiate the Fifth Crusade of 1218. Prof Doyle added: 'This is *not* a blanket condemnation of Harvard, who have treated me well. I'm talking about the idea, currently (I hope) dying on its feet, that men can literally be women, & its horrific ramifications, including male rapists in women's prisons & the mutilation & sterilization of confused gay & autistic teenagers.' His comments come following a landmark Supreme Court ruling in April that the term 'woman' means a biological woman. Now, he has told The Times that 'Harvard is just like a lightning rod for this kind of stuff', before accusing universities of 'doing a terrible job of creating safe spaces of intellectual inquiry'. 'They've done a terrible job of ensuring that what's supposed to be education doesn't slide into indoctrination,' he added. The retired professor was raised in Liverpool and studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge before going on to complete a PhD at the University of Virginia. He took a number of academic posts both in the UK and the US before joining Harvard in 2015. Andrea Brookes, a spokesman at the Beaumont Society, the largest transgender support group in the UK, said: 'Doyle is another in a line of educated people who believe that because they have an academic title they are entitled to spout off about something outside of their area of expertise and to make the most outrageous claims about educational establishments being captured or some such tripe.' His comments come after Prof Kathleen Stock, a former philosophy professor at the University of Sussex, was hounded out of her job over her views on gender rights. In March, the Office for Students watchdog imposed its highest ever financial penalty – £585,000 – after it was found to have 'failed to uphold' freedom of speech and academic freedom in her case. Following the ruling, Baroness Smith of Malvern, the universities minister, said that higher education institutions must learn lessons following the record fine, and that universities have been put 'on notice' to uphold free speech following the treatment of Prof Stock.
Times
19-07-2025
- Sport
- Times
Tipperary v Cork was the summit for me and my dad. I'll be thinking of him
The thing I'll miss from this All-Ireland final is the phone call. The one that came after every match from wherever my father was, at home or in hospital when his health began ebbing away, his portal to a world he couldn't reach anymore. And if Tipperary had just been in combat with Cork, the chat could eat up most of the road. Because in our world, Tipperary and Cork games became for us like a trip to St Peter's Basilica for the committed Catholic. Hurling was my father's addiction, going to school in Thurles and hurling at home in Ballycahill in the 1960s when Tipperary were in full pomp. He would tell stories of watching Jimmy Doyle pucking a ball alone off the back wall of Semple Stadium and jousting with John Doyle in club matches unseen by the rest of the world. He loved the stylists, abhorred the dark arts and adored Tipp, no matter how much I insisted those two opinions couldn't be held simultaneously by any Tipp supporter. He moved to Cork in the early 1970s and suffered the twin horrors of Tipperary's wander through the wilderness till the late Eighties while Cork won All-Irelands hand over fist. The slagging in the old sugar beet factory in Mallow where he worked was hilarious and merciless. All that pain intensified his devotion. Instead of being reared on the pure drop of Cork club hurling I was educated at the killing fields of mid-Tipperary and beyond. Even if the games weren't great, they were only the hook for everything that really mattered. In those car rides up we talked, maybe about hurling first, then other things. My father would talk about the importance of throwing everything into a match but how it was equally important to let all that go once the game was over. He often talked about the old men in Ballycahill who might go to three matches on a single Sunday, sometimes leaving before the end. It was the hurling they travelled for, they always said, not the outcome. There was a reason we loved hurling that went beyond winning, but Cork-Tipp was always the sharp end of all that. The best days? The 1990 Munster final when Cork stunned Tipperary and my father declared his biggest worry as the rain fell that morning was how to keep his pipe tobacco dry. The 1991 Munster final replay when Tipp won a mind-blowing game and I squeezed in by pushing an old friend of the family in his wheelchair. I spent that day behind the Tipp dugout, enthralled and distraught and thrilled all at the same time. Any time I see highlights from 1991 now, I realise I'm still not over it. One side-effect of growing up through that time was any All-Ireland title for Cork without beating Tipperary has never felt fully-dressed. So, imagine what Sunday means. No game, no sporting event, will ever feel bigger. None of this is anything unique either, or some teary form of hurling exceptionalism. Millions of other matches and pairings across the sports will evoke the same feelings for people. It's a feeling that transcends sport, too, the common ground where people could meet and connect and find the best of each other. Tipp-Cork was the day that always took us by the hand to somewhere else. Tipp-Cork was the day we always waited for. It's nine years now since my father died. Sometimes it feels like a long time. On days like this, not so much. In the weeks before his death we had time to say to each other everything any father and son might wish to say. But I remembered one day that always bothered me. In 1987 the Munster final between Tipperary and Cork went to a replay in Killarney. We couldn't get tickets, leaving us at home listening on the radio as Michael Doyle from my father's parish scored the goals that finally beat Cork in extra time and won Tipp their first Munster title for 16 years. I can still see him lying on the bed, whooping and cheering as I stood in the doorway, ten-years-old and unable to hold back the tears. For years it had bugged me that I pulled him out of that place of supreme bliss to console me, so I said sorry. He stared blankly at me. 'What match?' he said. 'The Munster final in Killarney,' I replied. 'Michael Doyle's goals.' He looked at me and threw his eyes to heaven. All he remembered was beating Cork. What else mattered? He'll be thinking the same today, wherever he is.
Irish Times
05-07-2025
- Sport
- Irish Times
I am still that small tearful boy waiting for Dublin's next sacred hurling final
'Why are you crying?' my mother asked. 'Because Dublin lost,' my 11-year-old self replied. 'But you are Tipp,' she said. 'No, I am not, I am Dublin.' A tearful exchange in the Hogan Stand on the first Sunday in September 1961 at the end of my fifth All-Ireland hurling final. Having attended all but two since, that little boy is still waiting for Dublin's next appearance in the sacred final. We spent every summer on my mother's childhood farm, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in Hollyford, west Tipperary with siblings and cousins. We learned how to milk cows and save hay but when that 'hay was saved and Cork bet' in Munster finals we travelled through west Tipperary following Sean Treacy's hurling club as they challenged for junior hurling glory. We found ourselves in Annacarty, Cappawhite, Golden and Dundrum, where hurling was played to the death. Sometimes the rules were obeyed. Our Uncle Tim, Thady to everybody else, brought six or seven of us to these matches, originally in a horse and trap and later in his upmarket yellow Volkswagen. He was a club mentor walking up and down inside the sideline whirling a hurley above his head, advising friend or foe on the pitch what to do or not do. Sean Treacy's was an introduction to the vagaries of club hurling but the real learning was at the county venues where we grew to idealise hurlers such as Jimmy and John Doyle, Donie Nealon, Liam Devanney, Tony Wall and so many others. But they weren't idealised in 1961. Wall went off injured very early. Devanney moved to centre back and hurled his heart out, preventing the Dublin forwards scoring as much as they might have. He and Tom Ryan won the game for Tipp. Ryan came on as a sub at corner forward. Did he last 10 minutes? No. He and one of our heroes, Lar Foley, got sent off midway through the second half for a shemozzle that I am sure Lar didn't start. This severely weakened the Dublin defence. That Dublin team included Lar and Des Foley, Noel Drumgoole, the Boothman brothers, Paddy Croke, Des Ferguson and the great Jimmy Gray in goal. They deserved to win Celtic Crosses that day. As it was, the two Foleys and Des Ferguson righted that wrong two years later, but in football, a Dublin reality that's repeated to this day. READ MORE Growing up in Mount Merrion, as remote from a hurling stronghold as Fermanagh or Fiji, I had a Wexford-born friend who was a serious hurler. One day in the 1960s he was standing at the top of Mount Merrion Avenue, hurl and kit bag in hand when a car stopped and the passenger window was rolled down. My friend stood back, he was streetwise. The driver asked him where he was going, he stood back even farther and muttered 'Cuala', whereupon the driver said he couldn't believe it, that it was great as in his 40 years living in the area, he had never seen a young lad with a hurley in Mount Merrion or Stillorgan. He didn't know the future was Kilmacud Crokes . When my friend was starring for Cuala and Dublin minors along with the Holden brothers, I was playing Dublin B schools hurling with Coláiste Mhuire. One lad on the team reached inter-county level; the rest of us didn't, which probably explains why in due course he emigrated to Kilkenny. We did reach a final in 1968, which, to the credit of the authorities, was played one morning in Croke Park – my one and only game there, never to be forgotten. Coming off the pitch I was offering autographs but nobody seemed interested. That year a number of us registered as minors with Na Fianna and, to my great delight, our under-18 team was managed by Jimmy Gray, who in the few games I played treated us as All-Ireland material. The years between 1961 and 2010 were not auspicious. But then, in 2011, under Anthony Daly's exciting and enthusiastic management, Dublin won the National league and 30 players climbed the steps of the Hogan Stand to hold and wave the cup to the fans on the pitch and those on the Hill – yeah, there were a few of them up there. A league quarter-final against Tipperary in Thurles in the 1990s also comes to mind. Managers such as Foley, Michael O'Grady, Humphrey Kelleher and others sweated blood for the team; Friends of Dublin Hurling ensured that there were always supporters at away games. Those of us who love Dublin hurling, even if, like me, they are not involved in the club scene, believe that the county's day has to come. Ballyboden St Enda's, Cuala, Kilmacud Crokes and Na Fianna have since 2013, as either county champions or All-Ireland champions, produced magnificent hurlers. A lot is to do with the gene pool, blood and inheritance. I'm blessed that three nephews of mine, but more importantly, grandsons of the Tipperary woman mentioned at the start, have won Leinster minor hurling medals separate from each other. The second, Barry, captained the 2007 team; the youngest, Oisín, won two. There followed for him the heartbreak of losing two minor All-Irelands. Thankfully he continued to play on very successfully at club and county level. He is a hero to my grandson Matthew, who a few weeks ago in a Crokes under-nines mini All-Ireland series scored an almighty goal that John Hetherton successfully emulated in that surreal Dublin quarter-final win over Limerick . John Hetherton scores Dublin's first goal against Limerick during the GAA All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship quarter-final at Croke Park on June 21st. ©INPHO/James Crombie [ Dessie Farrell played a diminishing hand well, but Dublin will continue to struggle at the top table Opens in new window ] It was a joy to observe in 2013 that Dublin had an outstanding team after the League win in 2011. Kilkenny came from behind to draw the semi-final in Croke Park. I was upset that the replay was on the following Saturday in Nowlan Park, as we were booked for a Rod Stewart concert in the RDS that evening. Trudging off to Ballsbridge, earphones plugged in to RTÉ, I was oblivious to the performance on stage and absorbed by the commentary. When Dublin scored a goal in the final minutes that essentially sealed victory, I jumped to the sky and cheered as Rod did his thing. Neither he nor those around me had any idea what was going on but my bum met the seat before they could call the stewards to remove me. Thankfully my son was at the match in my stead. A highlight of Dublin winning the final a fortnight later was that the Leinster Council president invited Gray to present the cup to the winning captain, Johnny McCaffrey. Dublin's captain John McCaffrey leads out his team for the Leinster GAA Hurling Senior Championship Semi-Final Replay against Kilkenny in 2013 ©INPHO/James Crombie What's to be said about the semi-final against Cork that year, except that Dublin had the winning of it – and of what would have been the subsequent final against Clare – but for Ryan O'Dwyer being sent off after a second yellow card with some time to go. All Dubliners have their views on the first yellow – it shouldn't have been awarded. What a final it would have been, Anthony Daly v Davy Fitz with the smart money on Daly. It wasn't to be. We have a repeat of that semi-final on Saturday evening. Cork again are favourites but I dream Dublin are halfway to winning – it is July, the hay is saved and maybe the Tipperary woman who imbued this love for hurling in us may gently turn in Shanganagh soil, Cuala territory, and say 'Come on Dublin, bate Cork'. Andrew O'Rorke is a former legal adviser to The Irish Times
